💾 Archived View for gemini.ctrl-c.club › ~stack › gemlog › 2023-03-07.broken.gmi captured on 2023-04-26 at 13:54:53. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2023-03-20)
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Sometimes I feel a little cursed with a 'death by a thousand paper cuts' curse.
This morning my Roku remote failed to work. Worked fine yesterday. Roku has a weird remote with WiFi built in and goes through its 2x AAA batteries fast, but it has an on-screen indicator that rings a 'low-battery' alarm, to their credit. But it did not go off. Batteries were dead, and I replaced and paired the remote.
Just an annoyance for me, but what if it happened last week? There is no way my mom could do this. Not that it's hard, but when you are 85 faced with this kind of thing, it is hard. Even knowing when to expect delay of a couple of seconds before pairing takes place and not push the button over and over or pull the batteries and try again is hard! How the **** are you supposed to know that?
When I sit at the computer, more stupidity. The screen is blank as usual - the computer is asleep. Will it wake up? You never know - it's different every time. Sometimes I have to type in the password blind. Often the caps lock is on for some reason, and I have to try again. Sometimes I have to do it on the notebook itself (I have a large display and a keyboard for normal use).
Speaking of caps lock, that's a whole rigomorole of its own. As an often-Emacs-user I switch CapsLock and Ctrl keys to avoid carpal tunnel. This time I did it with a 'setxkbmap -layout us -option ctrl:swapcaps' in my .bashrc - seemed like a good way to do that. But the system is fighting me and very often, for no reason, the mapping reverts to the standard and I wind up caps-locking myself. I have to open a new terminal and close it, and I am back. I know there is a better systemwide way, but I can't remember how.
Today, I could not wake up the machine, after trying all the possible permutations. I even tried to pull up a console but the machine was not responsive to C-A-function keys either. The drive was blinking and god only knows what it was doing when I rebooted.
Screens came on and I typed in my password on the USB keyboard. The mouse was unresponsive. Check the USB hub - looks ok, power is on, plugged in -- and the keyboard worked right? Well, it no longer works, no matter what I do. Another USB hub broken? But it took my initial password, so it's software. Well, it no longer seems to work.
This is just the first half hour of my morning. And good morning to you.